Death of a Nationalist by Rebecca C. Pawel

"Pawel anchors a tense and exciting story with a terrific and complex plot."—Detroit Free Press

"[Pawel] turns the clock back to 1939 and Madrid’s tumultuous past. . . . An intriguing juxtaposition of the political and the personal."—Kirkus Reviews

"An intriguing tale amid the gloom of war-torn Madrid. It is a humane and moving portrait of a divided people coming to grips with the virtues of enemies and the villainy of friends."—Dan Fesperman

Madrid 1939. Carlos Tejada Alonso y León is a Sergeant in the Guardia Civil, a rank rare for a man not yet thirty, but Tejada is an unusual recruit. The bitter civil war between the Nationalists and the Republicans has interrupted his legal studies in Salamanca. Second son of a conservative Southern family of landowners, he is an enthusiast for the Catholic Franquista cause, a dedicated, and now triumphant, Nationalist.

This war has drawn international attention. In a dress rehearsal for World War II, fascists support the Nationalists, while communists have come to the aid of the Republicans. Atrocities have devastated both sides. It is at this moment, when the Republicans have surrendered, and the Guardia Civil has begun to impose order in the ruins of Madrid, that Tejada finds the body of his best friend, a hero of the siege of Toledo, shot to death on a street named Amor de Dios. Naturally, a Red is suspected. And it is easy for Tejada to assume that the woman caught kneeling over the body is the killer. But when his doubts are aroused, he cannot help seeking justice.

\Rebecca Pawel is twenty-eight years old and a graduate of Columbia University. She lives in New York City and teaches Spanish and English in a Brooklyn high school. She is the author of Death of a Nationalist, Law of Return, and The Watcher in the Pine. Rebecca frequently travels to Spain.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Death of a Nationalist

Kirkus Reviews

When Carlos Tejada Alonso y Léon, a sergeant in the Guardia Civil, recognizes his compadre in the siege of Toledo, Paco Lopez, as the corpse lying dead in the street, he is so incensed that he immediately executes the woman bending over to retrieve a notebook, assuming that she has killed Lopez.

Reviewing the Evidence

But the mystery and suspense in the storytelling is compelling  viewpoints shift between the different characters  and while I can not judge completely the historical accuracy, I like the way that Pawel captured and took me completely into the emotional responses of her characters to events.